Weak & Divine by FEYXUAN

April 16, 2021: FEYXUAN aka Xuan Nguyen (they/them) is a musical artist from Detroit, Michigan and is a Gr collective member. Though since this EP, they’ve branched out into a fey orchestral music niche, they do intend to someday come back to the stageplay-esque vocal stylings of this WEAK & DIVINE EP. In their inner circles, this EP is referred to as the Amadeus EP, since it is derived from the Amadeus Vu songs from their libretto, THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH (Feb 2021, Flower Press). A libretto, they’ve been told, is the narrative writing for an opera, which sounds a bit better than the “stageplay-lyricbook-musical” which they’d been going with before.

Amadeus Vu is a queer, transgender, and disabled man who will become Empress of Heaven, though the way he constructs his narrative of gender is to use he/him during his life as a mortal and she/her only after she ascends. The songs in this EP showcase a few of his most vulnerable moments as a mortal and what drives his divine obsession. I know obsession is a term used lightly (the oxymoron of people saying they are “mildly obsessed” with a Netflix show or something, when they do not mean it is so extremely consuming that the fabric of themselves is woven into the obsession), but on the other end of the spectrum, psychiatry has no place in the formulation of Amadeus Vu. You cannot say Amadeus Vu is evil and call it a day. Neither can you say she has done nothing wrong. In the last song of the EP, he says, “What now will you do when / you cannot forgive, you cannot pity, and you cannot save?” Traumatized people are either seen as helpless innocents or conniving villains. Either you have no agency, or you do the wrong things with your agency. Either way, the narrative is taken from you. Amadeus Vu is a traumatized individual who is the creator of her own myth, seizing her origin story from her abuser, and also seizing it from all that would seek to view her through a reductive lens of absolute, binary morality.

If there’s one thing you get from WEAK & DIVINE, Amadeus’s EP, I hope you get that narratives of traumatized people are massively complex, and our stories are never so simple as the world might want you to think.

Artist receives 75% of all proceeds of digital only sales. The remaining 25% supports Grimalkin's label and mutual aid fund and helps us towards sustaining our work.

All proceeds from the sale of tapes go to Answer Detroit:

answerdetroit.org

"We are a group of sex workers who created ANSWER Detroit in the summer of 2019 because we were really fucking ready to decriminalize sex work. We founded ANSWER with the belief that decriminalization is only one piece of the juicy liberation we deserve; as sex workers and as humans just trying to survive capitalism.

Therefore, we created five focus areas for our work. In creating these focus areas, we set the intention for organic community growth that aligns with our collective vision:

POLITICAL POWER BUILDING

MEDIA & EDUCATION

CULTURE & CREATING ARTS

HEALTH, HOUSING, LEGAL SUPPORT

HEALING & WELLNESS"

All proceeds from the sale of lathes fund physical releases of other artists on Grimalkin Records. We break even if all of them sell.

grimalkinrecords.bandcamp.com

credits

released April 16, 2021

written, produced and recorded by FEYXUAN

feyxuan.bandcamp.com

Produced in FL Studio 20

Sound effects obtained from www.zapsplat.com

Music Box & Celesta from Necromare

Sounds By Vilkas Sound: youtu.be/BIXH3I6NzB4

Moths-Who-Have-Eyes features Hazel Nightengale as Severin

mixed and mastered by Nancy Grim Kells

graphic design and artwork by FEYXUAN

Thank you to my Wigglers who have supported me so dearly throughout the entire construction of the whole personal multimedia franchise that THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH has become. Thank you to Percy, who beta’d the TFSETE libretto for me! Thank you to Grim, who so kindly and patiently helped me with all the trouble of mastering (and it was a lot of trouble from my end!) Thank you to Mabel, who was the person who made me realize music was a thing I could do, because it’s something I know I’ll do for the rest of my life. Love you all!

Huge thanks to Louis and MFED for premiering this album and for interviewing Fey: www.mesenceintesfontdefaut.com/2021/04/16/interview-premiere-feyxuan-weak-divine-album/

Huge thanks to Liam and Various Small Flames for premiering the single Lord of the Butterflies for us: varioussmallflames.co.uk/2021/03/19/feyxuan-lord-of-the-butterflies/